Guggenheim Bilbao

Modernist architect Raquel Vert laughs when she recalls the 10 years during which she and her husband, Chaim, lived in their 1950s Encino ranch house before deciding to remodel. "I was working around the clock, seven days a week, in Frank Gehry's office and didn't have time for anything," she says, "much like the proverbial shoemaker's child with no shoes." She even resisted making decorative changes. "I wanted to do it right or not do anything at all."

Following Monday's announcement that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation will withdraw plans for a major new Manhattan development due to the rocky state of the U.S. economy, the development's architect, Frank Gehry, says he's not writing off the project just yet.

EXPERIENCE Patagonia by land and by sea on an 11-night Smithsonian expedition. The tour, which begins Nov. 3, will be led by Kirt Kempter, an expert in plate tectonics and volcanism who has led study tours throughout South America. Participants fly from Santiago to Punta Arenas, both in Chile, where they embark on the 129-passenger Mare Australis to sail the Straits of Magellan to Ushuaia, Argentina.

Was 2007 a mediocre year for new buildings? A nascent consensus in certain parts of the architecture world says so, and it's not hard to understand why: With the exception of Steven Holl's extension to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., which opened to raves in the spring, no building by a prominent architect to debut this year escaped critical complaint or public ambivalence altogether.

The vision arrived, as visions usually do, late at night. Anke Mazzei unrolled her frog-green sleeping bag. Lying on the floor of the gutted silver Airstream parked in St. Louis, she saw its reflection on the roof. A mundane observation to most, perhaps, but not to the seven young car designers seeking a muse along Route 66. Inspired, they spent the next two weeks contemplating sunsets reflected against the trailers' aluminum siding.

One day two years ago, photographer Paul Rocheleau found himself in Iowa with time to kill and a newspaper article about artist Andy Goldsworthy in his pocket. He'd finished his day's work early, taking pictures of one-room schoolhouses, so Rocheleau spent the afternoon at the Des Moines Art Center. There he stumbled onto the inspiration for "Architecture for Art: American Art Museums 1938-2008" published in December by Harry N. Abrams.

The year 2001 will not be remembered for a dazzling trend or a seductive must-have product. But if the design revolution slowed along with the economy, someone did manage to reinvent the trophy. To be sure, there's a need. This year alone, three prestigious awards programs identified 13 leading talents working in fields as diverse as performing arts and digital typography. Their names are familiar chiefly within their professions, but their high-performance design is omnipresent.

The last time the American Institute of Architects descended on Los Angeles for its annual convention, downtown was desperate, Walt Disney Concert Hall was a moribund civic embarrassment, "design" was something schoolkids did rather than a middle-class fetish on sale at Target, and even the most ambitious architects tended to go about business never imagining that reaching the top of their field could transform them into star-magnitude international celebrities.

This post has been corrected. Please see below. With his fellow Pritzker Prize-winning L.A. architect, Thom Mayne, playing the self-described role of “ombudsman” and “facilitator,” Frank Gehry is back in the fold for a major exhibition on Los Angeles architects that will open June 16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Gehryhad withdrawn about a month ago, saying he doubted it would be “a scholarly, well-organized show” and...

October 14, 2001 | HAL FOSTER, Hal Foster is Townsend Martin professor of art and archeology at Princeton University, and is the author of 'Design and Crime,' forthcoming from Verso next year. A slightly different version of his essay first appeared in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk)

For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. Projects and prizes, books and exhibitions flow toward him (including a retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, opening Oct. 29), and he is often called, without a blush of embarrassment, a genius. Why all the hoopla? Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters truly Our Greatest Living Artist?